


Intervention

by Zuhayr



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate, The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 23:14:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3186878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zuhayr/pseuds/Zuhayr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Culture Mind is sarcastic at the Ellimist. Set somewhere between the Ellimist vanishing into a black hole and the genocide of the Pemalites.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intervention

Within the debris of yet another defeat, the Ellimist watched and witnessed. The Howlers had dropped out of Z-space in the lee of the system's primary - this was expected. They had found the flotilla of seed ships concealed with the penumbra of the gas giant - also expected. They had then ignored the decoys and the tantalizing wailing of the distress satellite (polite, as always; even the Pemalite's emergency beacons began with 'dearest friend and listener'). They even ignored the painstakingly placed, wavering plumes of drive exhaust indicating a crippled engine heading out of system. Instead, they swarmed together, curved in a tight arc through an outer orbit, and unloaded their stubby, vicious beam weapons into the the asteroid field, systematically crippling the handful of Pemalite vessels hidden there. With the shining silver craft drifting in lazy spirals, propelled by the venting of their own atmosphere, the Howlers had descended and picked them apart.

There had, naturally, been no survivors.

The Ellimist was irritated by this, and irritated further by his own irritation. He should feel sadness, or surely grief; his children were dead. He should feel less like a novice beaten at a game of tokens. It was beneath him to waste time on something as petty as pique, he was certain, and yet it smarted to lose yet another fleet - smarted more than his regret at the loss of thinking minds. Worse yet, another promising new system was now dust in the face of the predations of the Crayak. The threads of space-time furled around him quivered with the weight of his displeasure, thrumming an odd and quizzical note, and the player of games forced himself to peace. There would be other conflicts. There were always other conflicts.

The Howlers were gone now, hot on the trail of the surviving frigate. He wished his children luck. It was all he could find in himself to offer them now; the labyrinthine complexities of the endless millennial game had left him hollow and cold, even in his fleshless state. Could he truly continue dancing to the Crayak's blood-soaked beat? How many lives must be gambled and lost before these careful rules became an intolerable weight? Better to fracture space and time itself to destroy his nemesis, surely, than to permit this slow bleeding of intelligent life from the Galaxy.

So lost was he in his own fit of creeping despair that the delicate touch of another player at the table almost passed him unnoticed. It was only when he felt the debris field quiver under the weight of Z-space engines, and felt the feather-light touch of questing sensors that he roused from his melancholy. It was a ship, a sleek white running-shoe of a ship - damaged, too, with great dark patches and splintered spars projecting from the mangled aft section. Something hung at each ship's core in a tangled, knotted snarl of threads that was almost, but not entirely, unlike anything the Ellimist had ever seen.

All at once, the delicate touch of the newcomer's sensors retreated, and an unfamiliar flow of thought buffeted him - politely. Politely? It was a -hail-? There was language here, and the Ellimist struggled to integrate this flash-flood of elegant new symbols into his expanded mind. What WAS this grammar? It tasted of careful and methodical thought, centuries of construction - it was as much as game as a spoken tongue. But the Ellimist was good at games. In a terrible breathless handful of instants he built a working lexicon and turned his attention to the cheerful message encoded within the signal.

> **x Very Fast Picket _Spit And A Prayer_ (Culture Ulterior)**  
>  **o Depressive Hypergrid Intrusion Entity**  
>  You're broadcasting tragedy on every local frequency, just so you know. They're probably picking it up years out - whole civilizations of dirt-grubbers are excitedly recording your ennui as proof of life outside their tepid little gravity wells. Am I interrupting the pity-party?

Almost a full second passed in startled silence as the Ellimist processed this. Well. No weapons - that was a positive sign, at least. A confused welter of emotion squelched into the transmission band as he replied.

> **x The Ellimist**  
>  **o VFP _Spit And A Prayer_ (Culture Ulterior)**  
>  Who are you?
> 
> **x VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  **o The Ellimist**  
>  Can't you parse _marain_? My ident brackets this message. Please tell me I'm not so far out in the sticks that I've stumbled over an equiv-tech non-Involved.
> 
> **x The Ellimist**  
>  **o VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  I do not interfere in the affairs of other species - and you do not make very much sense, friend. What do you seek?

The ship - the -thinking- ship, the Ellimist realized with an uneasy stirring of worry - skated through the debris field and fell towards the primary in an elegant spiral, leaving a wide band of heated vapour behind it and deftly compensating for the vicious damage to its starboard engine nacelle. The reply, when it came, was flippant, coloured with the emissions of the star.

> **x VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  **o The Ellimist**  
>  It's polite to say hello when you're visiting a new volume. Or am I being ethnocentric? Besides, I need a favour. I shook hands with the grid and the people on board are starting to lose life support.

That trail, then, was atmosphere. Whatever this grid was, it had been vicious.

> **x The Ellimist**  
>  **o VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  I can spare little to help you, stranger. My war occupies all my efforts.
> 
> **x VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  **o The Ellimist**  
>  A war? With who - some local empire? Surely the Idirians haven't reached this far across the spiral arm - there goes the primary gravity module, oxygen filtration will be next - and something like you wouldn't be dropping antimatter on squabbling organics, surely.

A twist, a pull, a rushing sensation; the Ellimist sent his awareness skating along in the ship's wake, watching as it tugged and bent the strands of spacetime just so, drawing thrust and yaw seemingly out of nothing, like some kind of terrestrial animal swinging effortlessly through a profusion of vines. It flared out its structure, braking or - harvesting from the solar wind, perhaps. This close, the Ellimist could feel the strange flavours of the minds within. Strange, four-limbed creatures of some unfamiliar species, close to four hundred in all; the Spit And A Prayer wasn't lying.

> **x The Ellimist**  
>  **o VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  I contend with the greatest threat the Galaxy has ever known. A force that seeks only to devour entire worlds - to destroy the fragile grasp of life upon this tapestry of stars. Only through-
> 
> **x VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  **o Overblown Hyperspace Narrator**  
>  Very dramatic. Very impressive. I'm jettisoning a century of philosophy from storage just to make room for the tale of your struggle. Look, I have several hundred people on board and I'm limping on one functioning warp unit. My only stable orbits or escape vectors take us too close to the star for me to screen the crew - I am formally requesting your assistance as an unarmed diplomatic ship of the Culture.
> 
> **x The Ellimist**  
>  **o VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  I don't appreciate your tone.
> 
> **x VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  **o The Ellimist**  
>  I don't appreciate an Involved intelligence playing stupid games when lives are at stake. If you'd vape an unarmed picket ship for sass then me and the people on board are all dead anyway. What'll it be?

This name, this 'Culture', was unfamiliar. The Ellimist filed it away for later thought, nursing the - perhaps unintentional - sting of the little ship's words. There were rules. To interfere was to doom entire civilizations. He had learned this through sheer blighted experience. But perhaps... well, this newcomer was not part of the game. There would be no reprisal from the Crayak - no worlds burned, no agreements cast aside. The Ellimist located a particular strand of time and yanked - harder than needed, perhaps.

The _Spit And A Prayer_ flared its fields like a startled bird as the system's bloated gas giant leaped hundreds of thousands of kilometres in its orbit, barreling down on it like the fist of a particularly surly God - then halting, twisting the local fabric of space into a confused storm of instability and shifting fields. The picket ship clumsily caught the realigned slope of the gravity well and banked hard, falling into a slightly shaky but largely stable orbit. If he still had quills, the Ellimist would have ruffled them smugly.

> **x The Ellimist**  
>  **o VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  There are asteroids within easy reach. Conduct your repairs at your leisure.

Silence reigned on the transmission band for a handful of moments.

> **x VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  **o Significantly Scarier Entity Than Previous Assessment Indicated**  
>  Thanks. We owe you one.

As the Ellemist began to withdraw his awareness, turning his distributed intellect towards the next system - and to the Crayak - he picked up a final, very faint transmission.

> **x VFP _Spit And A Prayer_**  
>  **o The Ellimist**  
>  Arrogant bastard.

Zero-space closed over him in a wave.


End file.
